I get a lot of scary things in the mail—my Visa bill comes to mind first—but the other day I got something that said, "It's not a question of if your family will come in contact with a violent criminal, but rather when."
It was a DVD package addressed to Resident. Most items addressed to Resident go directly to my trashcan, but this one piqued my interest, so I slid the disc into the DVD player. A violent scene appeared in which a male intruder assaults a female in her home, throws her down, and tapes her mouth shut with packing tape.
If you're inclined to finish watching this 30-minute DVD, by the end you'll be getting the sales pitch for a residential community near Pahrump—Front Sight, Nevada—built around an armory and in which everyone gets gun training and self-defense courses and all manner of paramilitary instruction meant to protect you and your loved ones from the aforementioned violent criminals. Front Sight has been around since 1999, when a chiropractor-turned-gun enthusiast had a brilliant housing development idea—an upscale gun range community, rather than a golf course community.
The project has taken a number of different forms since its inception and endured quite a few blows—lawsuits, construction delays, missed completion dates—but it's still moving. If you watch the DVD, in fact, you'll get testimony from people who vow it's thriving—people who either go to Front Sight for arms training or have actually bought into the whole plan, and invested in housing parcels on the 550-acre plot.
Among many things, what's interesting about Front Sight in this stage of its development—brought to light by the bulk mail DVD— is the teetering of its mass marketing message from one about safety and gun sportsmanship to you're about to be a victim.
Advertisers will tell you that sex sells. What about fear? There are four types of purchase motivators, according to marketing psychologists: Needs, wants, desires, and fears. Wants differ from desires in that desires are more like fantasies—winning the lottery would be a desire, while craving an ice cream cone would be a want.
Not wanting to get thrown into a mysterious van while walking through your grocery store parking lot would be a fear. That's another image the Front Sight DVD shows—a woman being abducted by scary men in a van. Somewhere later in the advertisement, you'll see another, happier woman in a helmet rappelling down a mock SWAT tower on the Front Sight grounds; she stops long enough to say, "I'm no longer afraid ... to handle a handgun, I'm not afraid to tell somebody to get back, I'm not afraid to go off of a rappel tower!" I suppose the message here is, If I'm not afraid to rappel, I'm not afraid to walk through a dark parking lot past mysterious vans. Another DVD image shows a Front Sighter hanging from a rope by his feet, pointing a rifle of some sort, being lowered upside down to look into somebody's windows. I guess the message here is, I'm so at peace that I'll hang upside down with a rifle and look in your windows.
Motivator: Fear? Or desire?
Another image: men and women who wear camouflage lie on their bellies and fire assault weapons at targets. Another: The Front Sight founder says, "Full Auto Uzi Course ... instead of $600 a day, it's only $300!" Another: A happy gun-toter says, "It's almost like a pilgrimage to come here!"
Remember the duct tape? Terrorists struck, and we responded en masse by scurrying to the store to buy duct tape. We had to do (American translation: buy) something. We were afraid.
But for all its scary antics, the Front Sight DVD doesn't pull off the scare tactics with the same effectiveness as mass murder, thankfully. The most effective scenes from the bulk mailer are by far the testimonials, rather than the enactments of attacks, recitation of crime statistics, or the account of regret by a relative of a murder victim. Somehow, it's still hard to believe that anyone sees the connection between preventing rape and learning to rappel.
But more people can probably relate to this statement from the DVD: "It's truly the Disneyland for gun owners!" That's about the desire, the lottery, the fantasy. Which makes you think: Isn't this really about indulging the fantasy of killing people? Sure, it'd be nice to have the justification wrought by crime statistics, but in the end, is the joyous guy who calls Front Sight "Disneyland" worried? Or deliriously happy that he gets to shoot things? It's a life-size violent video game, the likes of which some people argue contribute to violence rather than channel it into something positive. In this theory, violence begets violence.
Historically it's easy to see that fear is more easily replaced with aggression than with reason. Think Iraq.
And clearly the large majority of our fears—job insecurity, social rejection, roaches, life after Everybody Loves Raymond—are not well served by the use of an Uzi.
But apparently that doesn't change the lure of a hot, rattling Uzi in one's hands, offering a discordant but nevertheless tangible response to the swirl of larger, more ineffable fears around us. It's the fantasy. The lottery.
But it does us well to remember the discordance.
When you go to your mailbox and find a DVD chock-full of scenes based on fear marketing, don't be scared into enrolling in an Uzi class or hanging out of a helicopter. Enroll if that's your Disneyland. There isn't any other justification.